About Me

Friday, October 21, 2011

Today I once again leave my virtual pen to Barbara (it seems all my other nail-obsessed friends are too shy to show up...) to show you her Halloween nails, that I've named "The Cats of Queen Beruthiel" for reasons I shall explain at the end ;)

"I saw your pics from Disneyland and the associated Halloween manis and I LOVE THEM!!! So I couldn't resist, and in between two piles of essays I tried my first Halloween mani. The colour is not very Halloween and Guinevere would probably have been very scared of all the spiderwebs, but what can I say, I received my a-England order last week and ever since I've been like a 5-year-old kid at Christmas, I'm changing my manicure every day just to try them all! So now we have a-england's Guinevere with cats and spiderwebs... I promise that next time I'll go for a total look with orange as a base colour!

I have to throw in some words about a-england polishes, I'm a total FAN!! Thanks Lélie for this amazing discovery (you're welcome ;) )!!! Application is perfect, colours are wonderful and it stays for days without chipping! It's a dream!!

On the pics you can see Guinevere (after one coat of The Knight as basecoat) in two coats, and a stamping with Fauxnad H25 for the spiderweb and Fauxnad T29 for the cat. Stamping was done with Konad black polish. Then I applied The Shield as topcoat but it smudged my designs, as you can see on some pics, so I had to do it all over again... I'm not a maniac, it's just that it's already hard for me to accept that the designs cannot be stamped the exact same way on every nail, so if there are smudges, it's way more than I can bear!! For the second try, I replaced The Shield with Seche Vite and it was perfect. SV is really my favourite top-coat because it dries so fast and doesn't make the stamping design smudge (especially with black Konad). I'm now ready to face the savage trolls, errr, I mean, my pupils!!"

Note on The Cats of Queen Beruthiel: this is one of those things that remained a literary mystery for a long time in Tolkien's world. In The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn speaks of Gandalf saying "he is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than the cats of Queen Berúthiel" and for many years, no other information could be find, until The History of Middle-earth was published. If you want to know more about Beruthiel and her cats, click the links. When Barbara mentionned the encounter of Queen Guinevere and Halloween cats it made me think of them, and as a true Tolkien geek, I couldn't resist sharing that piece of trivia with you :)